Word: germane
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...German days Grosz could be outrageous at times, but always he was outraged, and his searing anger burns through to this day. He learned to draw -or so he liked to say-in the officers' club his widowed mother ran for an aristocratic Prussian regiment in Pomerania. There "decrepit old men" would outline lewd pictures with soap on the mirror over the bar, and the boy would copy them in secret. Hardly noticed by them, he closely observed his mother's arrogant, stiff-backed, high-collared customers, whom he delighted in imitating all the rest of his life...
...beggars. Though Grosz was an impeccable draftsman, he used fierce, childlike lines to transform the world into a nightmare of distortion. "I always like to be a little tortured," he said. "You like to laugh, but you also like to be hit. It's the schizophrenia of the German race...
...famine, not pestilence, not war will bring back seriousness," Kierkegaard once said. "It is not till the eternal punishments of hell regain their reality that man will turn serious." German Philosopher Karl Jaspers feels that there is a fairly vivid equivalent of the horrors of hell in the threatened nuclear extinction of the human race. The Future of Mankind is a stern call to seriousness. It is also a call to reason, courage and responsibility. It is based on a premise that may sound bleak, but has probably been the rock of man's endurance through the ages...
After Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, 77, is the ranking German existentialist. Unlike Heidegger, who flirted briefly with the Nazis, Jaspers maintained a quiet but obstinate dissent. Ticketed for a concentration camp in 1945, he and his wife were saved by the U.S. Army's capture of Heidelberg. Though he tends to view Christianity less in orthodox terms than as a body of myth and symbols, Jaspers is a member of the Evangelical Church, and in 1946, in his book The Question of German Guilt, he bade Germans cross-examine their consciences on the war-guilt issue. Outspokenly independent...
Unfortunately, German philosophers write like German philosophers. Intellectually, Jaspers is easier to lose than to follow. The reader has an uneasy sensation of being caught in a brambly thicket of dialectics. But the book has a staunch nobility of spirit that commands respect...